Liam Barr

Old photographs still look like us.
The eyes and the grin are familiar.
Our names are on the back.

Nothing in the picture became false.
It stopped being current while we kept moving.

We know that about photographs.
We don't ask one how we should look today.

We treat memory differently.
We keep the old version close
and let it decide what we're like now.

Letting that person go can feel ungrateful.
They were real. Their choices brought us here.
The picture holds all of that.

It doesn't need us to keep posing.

A dozen versions have already gone this way.
Nobody marked the day.

The picture keeps who we were.
So we don't have to.

Nothing comes back.
A week of it. Then a month.

We stop checking around then.
And somewhere in the stopping we decide what the quiet meant.

Wasn't meant to be.
Wasn't aligned.

But quiet is the one thing that tells us nothing.
No answer in it and no verdict.
Just a gap we can't stand leaving open.

So we fill it and call the filling fate.

Then it turns up.
An ordinary morning months after we'd written it off.
Still moving the whole time.

The quiet never said it was over.
We did.

Someone you don't rate says something true.
You hear it land.

It's the thing you needed to hear.
Then you go looking for a reason it doesn't count.

You find one.
Not in what they said.
In who said it.

The same sentence in a book gets a nod.
Underlined. Read out at dinner.
Nobody asks what the author is like at home.

None of that changes the sentence.
The rest is on you.

It doesn't matter who said it.
It matters how you use it.